“Amira did a search through the depositions of civil lawsuits connected to the chaos crimes, like I asked,” Jon explained as they headed west across the city. “She found one where a junkie who got hurt in a panicked mob tried to sue the city for not keeping him safe, and as a part of his testimony saying how terrified he was, he mentioned a ‘big hairy guy’ who he saw knifing someone in the crowd. Seems he recognized the guy because he buys drugs from the same dealer at a club, and—you know how these people talk—he’s heard rumors that the guy kills for hire to pay for his meth habit. The junkie’s testimony is all over the map, but since that slice fit my criteria, Amira questioned him and found out the name of the club, the name of the dealer, and even the name of the big hairy guy.”
“Which is?” Halladay said.
“Shinsky. So Amira looked it up and, sure enough, there’s a guy with priors who fits that description. He was a football lineman when he was younger, so he shouldn’t be hard to recognize by his size, but here’s his picture.” Jon held out his phone to the yawning Scotsman.
“Yeah, he’s big,” Halladay said. “And hairy. But that’s hardly a crime, and this junkie doesn’t sound very reliable. Did you really have to wake me up for this?”
“If you have a better lead, let’s hear it. Dayfall is about ten hours away.”
“He’s also too big to be the perp from the office building,” Halladay said. “The one we saw on the video was a lot shorter.”
“So there might be two killers—at least. Fits a theory I have.”
They drove on in silence in the darkness of the Sunday evening, with Jon thinking about what might happen in the next ten hours, during the heavy thunderstorm that was predicted to roll in through the night and dissipate enough of the dense cloud cover for the sun to shine all day on Monday.
Another kind of shine was emanating from their destination when they reached it. Lit up like a carnival, Party Row was one of the hottest spots in the post-flagger economy of Manhattan. It stretched for a whole block on both sides of Twenty-Ninth Street in between Ninth and Tenth Avenues, club after club jammed in next to each other in two large industrial buildings that had been abandoned by businesses because they were too close to the water after the River Rise for the tenants to feel safe enough there. The only thing between them and the Westside Wall, in fact, was the truncated stretch of the High Line that still remained because the Wall was built along the outer side of that elevated train platform, which had been made into a public park before the flagger.
The businesses that formerly occupied these buildings could never have dreamed of raking in as much money as the thirty-plus establishments that had taken their place. The never-ending night of New York brought continual waves of partiers to the Row, and the light emanated from bright signs lining the streets on all sides of the massive buildings, and from spotlights and UV lamps shining from their rooftops. There were too many pedestrians and taxis on the streets for Halladay to do his parking trick here, so they had to take a spot in an adjacent garage and walk to the club where Shinsky’s dealer reportedly worked the crowd.
The Starlight was on the east end of the block in the north building, farthest from the High Line and the Water Wall. While some of the clubs in the Row were rather narrow or sat on top of one another, this one was a single large atrium room that stretched from the ground floor all the way up to a transparent ceiling at the roof. Jon figured that the stars had never actually been visible through the roof, because the club was built after the black clouds had descended, and they probably never would be due to the preponderance of light in the area. But the owners obviously were concerned with the sun coming through the next day, because when Halladay flashed his badge along with a picture of the dealer to various employees and managers, they all said something about how they were asking for a heavy police presence during Dayfall. This was the first evidence Jon had seen that the fears about it had definitely taken hold at the street level.
None of the employees were helpful in any way—they had probably been told not to assist the police in finding anyone, especially someone like a drug dealer who provided a commodity important to the club experience. But in response to directions from a random customer they questioned, the two cops made their way up some stairs to one of the raised balconies surrounding the main dance floor. As they did, Jon realized that the Starlight apparently had a sci-fi theme, with otherworldly lighting and some replicas of movie spaceships hanging from the walls. And the dealer they were approaching seemed to fit right in with the theme, because he looked like a vampire.
“Balo Spenser?” Halladay said to the white-skinned man sitting at the table.
“Call me Éric Le Boursier please,” he responded. “That’s my sang name.”
“Well, Fanny Baws is your Scottish name,” Halladay said, “so I’ll call you that. But we’re looking for a big hairy guy by the name of Shinsky who buys from you. Has he been here recently, Fanny, or is he coming by anytime soon?”
“The only illegal purchases I’m involved in,” Spenser/Boursier said, “is for the blood I need to survive.” He fingered a brightly colored button that was attached to his lapel in the middle of a collection of Gothic pendants—it said RIGHT TO BUY on it. “Because the government you work for discriminates against us by not allowing it to be sold in stores.”
“Oh, so you’re a real vampire—whatever the hell that is.” Halladay looked at Jon, nodding his head and pursing his lips. “This is a nice development, actually. Squeezing you about your drug business won’t get you to tell us anything, because you’re smart enough to not keep anything on you, and you send your buyers to another room to get it… maybe even to another club.”
As he said this he glanced over to the wall to the left of them on the balcony, where there was an interior entrance to the next club over, with a sign saying SWEETS above it.
“But I think we do have some leverage here,” Halladay continued, “because the bags you have in your refrigerator at home are still illegal in New York, and what you just said is enough for us to get a warrant and send a car over there while we make sure you stay here and don’t call anyone to hide them. And that’s not to mention the assault charges that we’ll bring after an investigation into your ‘bloodplay.’”
“We only feed by mutual consent,” the man said, agitated now and maybe even a little scared.
“Yeah, right. Tell me you’re gonna completely give up one of the biggest appeals of your new identity. We’ll find and interview everyone who’s been bitten by you, Fanny, and we’ll see if they all wanted you do it.”
“Okay, okay,” the dealer said, waving his pale hands with their long black fingernails in front of him, then flashing a fanged smile when he saw something behind the cops. “Oh, looks like I won’t actually have to tell you anything.”
He nodded ever so slightly toward what he was looking at, and the two police turned around to see Shinsky coming in the direction of the table from the other end of the balcony, literally head and shoulders above the rest of the crowd. Unfortunately, the big hairy suspect noticed them looking at him and veered off to the left toward the entrance to the adjacent club called Sweets. Jon and Halladay immediately headed that way themselves.
Just inside the entrance to the other club, they were greeted by a bouncer asking for the cover charge and their online invitations. The cops flashed their badges and confirmed that Shinsky had just passed through, asking the bouncer how he got in if an invitation was required. The man said that Shinsky had a “universal card,” which they took to mean a pass that allowed him to get into any and all of the clubs on Party Row.